Abstract

Stephen Crane and the Genius Myth

Thomas Beer, in his excellent study of Stephen Crane, relegates to an appendix the myths which, gathering about Crane's name, so confused a previous biographer that he gave up his task in despair of ever finding out the truth. Beer ascribes it to prejudice and envy; and Joseph Conrad, in his introduction to the book, takes pains to defend his dead friend against this "perfidious and contemptible gossip." Yet nothing is clearer than that the people who spread these preposterous stories were not animated by any hatred for Crane; they had no wish to do him injury. The Stephen Crane myth, which reveals nothing as to Crane himself, reveals much as to the state of mind of the times in which he lived-late nineteenth-century America.